Telegraph: Food for thought on global flavours

After the phenomenally successful A Bite of China series, a new food documentary, Once Upon A Bite, observing global fare and Chinese food across the world, has become an instant hit.

The first episode, broadcast nationally on 28 October 2018, includes 20 types of food from 13 countries and regions. Within 14 hours the documentary had racked up 150 million views on Tencent video and 9.4 on the review site Douban.com.

As well as an investigation of Chinese people and society and their relationship with food, the new eight-episode documentary, filmed over four years, journeys to 22 countries across six continents focusing on areas where “East meets West” to observe the rise and changes of Chinese food across the world.

“After all, it is ultimately food that can transcend nationalities, ideologies and religions, and heals you most,” said the show’s general director, Chen Xiaoqing. About one-third of the series is about global flavours, said Chen.

Each episode of the new series adopts a theme and is co-directed by eight young filmmakers.

The first episode, Mountains to Oceans, presents various ingredients and cooking practices in accordance to different geography, from inland to coastal areas.

“Surprisingly, places on similar latitudes, with similar climates but thousands of miles apart, have developed a similar way of curing and crafting hams completely independently of one another,” Chen said.

“We see both the differences and the harmonies of distinct cuisines while documenting the unique features of Chinese food with a global perspective.”

In one episode the documentary depicts different stages in which Chinese food is perceived in London, starting with dishes rarely offered within China but widely known in the West, such as General Tso’s chicken, Chen said.

It then visits Chinatown and the restaurants serving Sichuan and Cantonese cuisine, through which the city gets closer to the real flavours in China.

Now, he said, there is a third stage in which Chinese specialty and regional dishes are cropping up in London, such as spicy biang biang noodles from Shaanxi, panfried baozi (stuffed buns) from Shanghai and jianbing guozi (deep-fried dough sticks rolled in a thin pancake) from Tianjin.

Fuchsia Dunlop, an English writer specialising in Chinese cuisine and author of the bestselling book Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, appears on the show, explaining how Londoners get to know China through its food.